


The Craftsman

by LaughingLemur



Series: We spread our roots, as do trees [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Ambiguity, Gen, I wanted pretty rose prose but all I got was a bunch of thorns, Pain, Possible Universe Alteration, Regrets, navel-staring with Tobirama-sensei, so I used thorns instead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-17 11:44:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11274735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaughingLemur/pseuds/LaughingLemur
Summary: Unlike anyone else, Tobirama is the least likely to look at Hashirama, and forget whom existed before The God of Shinobi.





	The Craftsman

Humans have roots just like trees. We twist, crawl and turn through the soil in which we are born, then we grow and we grow and find that, one day, we grew up.

* * *

 

The heart is made of complex divisions that don't evenly divide.

(this is perhaps why divvying up fairly with chiefly the heart is often calamitous, if not unsuccessful)

* * *

 

Hashirama has built enough things throughout his life to fill a daimyo’s castle, provided that said daimyo was also a hoarder, a slightly dotty hoarder. He has callused his hands building the great and the mundane, the useful and the trite, the meaningful and things not sensible enough to even want meaning.

 

Blankets like thickets; dream catchers like a dryad’s vision of a spider’s web; bowls of many kinds, some happily remembered – like Tobirama’s first rice bowl -; others are coloured like the ash they once carried; spoons and chopsticks; quills and brushes;

cradles and coffins.

 

Never worse than when he made them both for the same person, but not nearly so bad as when prepared in advance.

 

Tobirama had no such cradle or coffin, it was dreary enough that he had a plot of land waiting for him. On nights when dreams are especially terrible, he sees Tobirama out near the pond, silver hair twinkling like liquid moonlight, and always he is fooled into believing it a happy dream, and always he sees wisps of shadows like branches of trees dragging across the peripheral. From past the west gate. Where their family is buried.

 

He can feel it-

 

They watch, not with eyes, but a voracious, demanding and all-consuming presence. They watch Tobirama. His brother, his first brother, his baby brother, who sees but does not  _see,_ quietlygazing at the light reflections of the pond, brushing his left hand over the still water. Hashirama watches the shadows watching; stakes a challenge, unvoiced. It is unlike his usual method of operation; it is no less serious.

 

No. Tobirama doesn’t need that cradle or that coffin, and Hashirama  _will not_  build his baby brother one.

* * *

 

Weary of adults lowered in child-sized coffins; of adults who echo the thought patterns without the lily-like innocence of children, and of children who must - are expected to - think as adults do, ignoring their desperately beating hearts - caged in small, breakable bones - beating wings of frightened doves. Shinobi do not speak the tongues of angels.

* * *

 

Were he there again he still would do anything in his power to protect his kinsmen, and his last living brother, the big brother –  _anijya_  – with broad, wide shoulders, broad, wide grins, and broad, wide ideals. What would change, undoubtedly, is a sympathy, a quicksilver glimmer of understanding. To protect he has spilt the blood of another’s brother just as the Uchiha had spilt that last living drops from his younger brothers, and he has known the horrible suffering - in double.

 

He had not known.

 

To lose the last brother isn’t quite the same for all it appears similar, identical even, from a distance. Just as a tortoise shell might easily pass for stepping stone in the thick of night.

* * *

 

A time when Hashirama was much more, while being much less than any god.

 

Tobirama would hold out his aching palms, bathed in a green glow; unravel cheese cloth, dab the red tinge away from his brother's skin, and disentangle the forest detritus from his brother’s short hair, covered in clumps of dirt. He'd been overzealous again, it seems. Night after night, a dedicated ritual. The healer's hands, they don't forget.

* * *

 

Regret is a different, though not altogether separate feeling swirling and ebbing about inside of him, in the manner of the waters wetting the sand between his toes. It’s a certain sense. A sense of loss.

 

What does one become if their truest identifying markers become nil? At what point is a daisy no longer a daisy? If it had no petals or must it too be without chlorophyll; what number of characteristics must it lose to change its definition?

 

What then, is a brother without any brothers?

 

An imitation, a ghost or something more but less than either of those.

* * *

 

Hashirama never forgot _whom_ made him not the son, but the _brother_. He left behind son, a toy outgrown, but stayed a boy. A boy with dreams that he shared like secret bedtime tales to a babe in a crib, the same one that blinked blurry ruby eyes at him and held his hand in a determined pinky. Always ready to listen, ready to watch.

 

Soon two little boys would join their family, and Tobirama wasn't the baby of the baby in the family anymore; he didn't need to hold his anijya's hand anymore. Tobirama was so determined and curious, he scouted the bustling world about him with big ruby eyes, broke down the information into manageable bits, and tottered along. Fast and smart even at such a tender age.

 

When Hashirama was ran ragged with his expectations as heir, he came back filled with knowledge and prospect, he had awakened the sacred Mokuton; clansmen praised his skills in Jutsu and woodwork, they called him a craftsman. Hashirama found his baby brother had taken to the role of an elder brother with a dedication and quiet earnestness he'd come to equate with Tobirama. It seemed the worries he had weren't necessary, after all.

 

Years later, Hashirama would miss when Tobirama's lips would part in a big smile when he'd laugh at something Kawarama had said or done; times when his red eyes softened as he tended to Itama's scraped knees after Itama had gone stumbling over his own clothes - he was growing quickly, but just slowly enough to be between sizes - half of one, half of the other. 

* * *

 

Some years after Konoha was built, rumours of war shuddered through the village. People were angry, people were scared, and some refused to react at all, stubbornly going about their lives like they heard nothing at all.

 

It took many years to get to here. It took too many coffins. 

 

By now, Hashirama is so weary of coffins. 

 

The first time Hashirama brings it up, Tobirama explodes: a skin-blistering geyser.

 

They are more stubborn than brass mules, the two of them.

 

Tobirama may be more than capable of winning battles of attrition, but Hashirama was the one who could glue himself to an idea or cause with all the insane tenacity of a person who never outgrew their one-track mind.

* * *

 

But he was clever, not as the leader did he command, nor as the God to which he ought to obey.  Either of which Tobirama could – and would – rally against should the need arise, until that point never having been one to slink away from a worthy fight, no matter how brutal, how bloody, how unpleasant, and anijya, showing the skill which brought him fame, used a weakness and turned it into a crushing advantage.

 

What approached Tobirama was a simple, almost deceptively so, humble figure: the brother.

 

Not to decree, but to speak, not to demand or even request, but to suggest; it was a mildness that would hide its grotesque forcefulness until it’s perpetrator would no longer face their charge.

* * *

 

The God of Shinobi was made from the flesh of his brother, the space between now and tomorrow where he shall sow the land to grow his dreams, and the blood in its veins are from the scratches, and half-open scabs from training until red sweat burst from his dirt-dusted skin, and the split lips his brother would get from grinning too wide after shouting off his dreams, his ideals, his unfading vision; always sitting on the horizon, enough to see, still too far away to touch.

* * *

 

Tobirama is Fire Country's greatest sensor so he knows that even if he were to chase after anijya, his brother is a day’s worth of footslog away. Moreover, he knows the signs of that certain intractable one-track-minded verve. Wrestling a bear summon would be easier at this point, than trying to derail whatever idea his brother is fixed on right now.

* * *

 

Sunlight trickles and bounces along the sea waves, shimmering off crests of foam as they shatter on hill rocks.

 

Tobirama has been watching a horizon awaken in a burst of colours, of juicy apple-reds, canary yellows, and seashell pinks. 

 

At the corner of his mind, Tobirama notices a solitary presence nearing.

 

Pale, shimmering green, with an autumn's breeze crispness, he knows this chakra signature well.

 

Gentle footsteps break open the waves nipping at the shore.

 

_slosh, slosh, slosh_

 

'It is time, Nidaime-sama,' 

 

Gusts of sea-wind fan their backs, Tobirama's robes lift like wings and his slighter companion's embroidered  _uchiwa_  crest dances vigorously, imitating the flames it fans.

 

They walk to Konoha in silence.

 

Yesterday breaths down their backs.

 

A horizon that can be seen; never touched.

**Author's Note:**

> Stop pestering me throughout the witching hours, you minor characters!
> 
> On an aside, the chances of me getting over these minor characters promptly, is slim. ¯\\_ಠ_ಠ_/¯


End file.
